GOP turns to McCain to reinvent party

In a delicious piece of irony, many dispirited Republicans, devastated by Tuesday’s special election loss in Mississippi, now believe their savior to be John McCain — a not-so-constant conservative many of them also have long intensely disliked.

The logic: McCain, the vaunted maverick, can move the party away from President Bush and reinvent a Republican brand that, at the moment, is in tatters.

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“The public is prepared to believe that McCain is a different kind of Republican,” said Republican Deputy Chairman Frank Donatelli, McCain’s point man at the committee. “This is not some political idea that was cooked up.”

But for all the talk and expectation that McCain will run from Bush like a scalded dog, the reality is different; so far, he hasn’t drawn many stark contrasts at all. Since winning the nomination, his policy proposals and high-profile speeches have included more conventional conservative dogma than nonconformist deviation.

To be sure, there are areas where McCain has walled himself off from the White House. A more aggressive response to global warming is one, and McCain spent two days in the environmentally conscious Pacific Northwest pressing the topic this week.

But on such central issues as the economy, health care, the judiciary and national security, McCain hasn’t wavered far from the right’s prized principles: tax cuts and less spending, market solutions and tax incentives, judges who will strictly interpret the law, and a stay-the-course approach on Iraq.

In order to not inflame his party’s base — or turn his back on a right-leaning record and his oft-stated claims of being “a proud conservative” — McCain’s attempt to distance himself from an unpopular incumbent and limping party have been so far more stylistic than substantive, more at the margins than at the core.

On foreign policy, he’s said he would take a humbler approach and “listen to the views and respect the collective will of our allies.”

But, he also supports an open-ended commitment of troops to Iraq – a policy that has clearly played a huge role in the GOP’s popularity dive.

On the economy, as he noted in his rollout address in Pittsburgh, Americans are “right to be offended when the extravagant salaries and severance deals of CEOs ... bear no relation to the success of the company or the wishes of shareholders.”

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But, he also emphasizes that deep tax cuts — the cure-all panacea of the Bush administration — are what is needed to get the economy moving.

He’s also hammered home the point that spending under GOP rule ballooned out of control and that the response to Hurricane Katrina was abysmal — but how many Republicans would disagree?

So not wanting to make significant policy breaks with the party (even his climate change speech emphasized the market approach he envisioned), McCain has instead offered symbolic feints to create some space between him and Bush.

For example, he took a weeklong trip to places that have not been hospitable to Republicans. The suggestion: that he’d not just limit his campaign to preaching to the faithful and would seek to energize the base à la Bush-Rove.

Lacking so far, however, has been anything approaching the anti-establishment “reform” theme that he ran on in the 2000 primaries.

Still, McCain’s efforts to walk the delicate line between retaining wary conservatives without diluting his centrist appeal have so far been met with some success. Polls show that he’s consolidated support among Republicans and that he runs far ahead of the so-called “generic” ballot test when paired against either of his potential Democratic rivals, though he still trails both.

But now, with his base secured and the GOP’s grave challenges emphatically made clear, particularly by this week’s loss in Mississippi in one of the most comfortably Republican congressional districts in the country, will he move more sharply to the middle and away from Bush, as many in his party want?

Not necessarily.

As low as his ratings are, Bush is still a fundraising draw and McCain needs the cash the president can deliver. The two will appear together for the first time at a fundraiser later this month in McCain’s hometown of Phoenix. And Bush will raise money separately for McCain the next day in Utah.